“I don't really think this is much different from what we all thought of
front loading without "nudging." Can you be more specific?”

Very good. So we are all clear that front-loading is not about determinism.
It’s not about endowing a single-celled organism with all the genes for
tigers, roses, and butterflies because natural processes cannot create those
genes. It’s about setting up a ‘choice architecture’ that would function to
nudge evolution into one trajectory vs. another. So the next place to get
specific is to focus on the very things I have been focused on for years –
where are the nudges? It would be best to begin modestly, so we might
imagine where we might find the nudges inside a unicellular cell plan that
would preadapt life such that multicellular life would be likely to emerge.

> Mike:
>
> As I understand your suggestion, we must consider conditional
> probabilities. So that P(E|C1) may be much greater than P(E|C2).
> Establishing a condition C1 would be considered a nudge, in that it moves
> one closer to a given outcome relative to another, or perhaps to all other
> possible conditions at the time.
>
> Since we are speaking here, not, as I understand it, of continual or
> frequent interventions by God, but of a front loading, where it seems that
> God only gets one chance, then what nudging appears to entail is that God
> established initial conditions such that certain events are more likely,
> if not much more likely, than others. In this way, e.g., we can say that
> God nudged the universe toward life, and even man.
>
> I don't really think this is much different from what we all thought of
> front loading without "nudging." Can you be more specific?
>
> Thanks,
>
> bill
>
> On Sun, 13 Sep 2009 20:21:06 -0400, "Nucacids" <nucacids@wowway.com>
> wrote:
>> As I have been arguing for the hypothesis of front-loading evolution over
>> the years, not too long ago, it has occurred to me that the term
>> "front-load" has the ability to mislead people into thinking I have
>> argued
>> that evolution is a deterministic process, such that everything we
>> currently see around us was programmed to be as it is as a consequence of
>> the originally front-loaded state. This misperception then causes people
>> to think front-loading is an old, discredited view of evolution. But
>> that
>> is not the case.
>>
>>
>>
>> To demonstrate this, I have just run across a design approach that is
>> very, very similar to the approach I talk about and have labeled as
>> "front-loading." It's a social engineering approach that is becoming
>> increasingly popular known as "nudging."
>>
>>
>>
>> I outline some of the similarities between nudging human behavior and
>> front-loading evolution here:
>>
>>
>>
>> http://designmatrix.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/nudge/>>
>>
>>
>> Mike
>